'No Bell' had hollow ring

Perry Vlahos

THERE'S enough in this story to make a good movie. It involves a great mystery, sexism, ''Little Green Men'', an astronomical breakthrough, a fox and the usurping of glory. The only things missing are a murder and Hercule Poirot, but I'm sure if the writers of Underbelly got hold of the story, they could weave them in.

Jocelyn Bell was a postgraduate student working with her thesis supervisor, Antony Hewish, at Cambridge University. With Hewish and others, she learnt to swing a sledgehammer and helped construct a radio telescope to study the newly discovered phenomena called quasars. Soon after, in July 1967, while reviewing the 30 metres of nightly paper data from the chart recorder noting what the telescope had observed, she saw something that looked a little odd. This signal had a startling precision in its regularity: the pulse repeated every 1.3373 seconds.

This was recorded only when the telescope pointed towards the constellation Vulpecula - the little fox - and even though Hewish and another senior physicist, Martin Ryle, dismissed its significance and thought the source to be a man-made glitch, Bell continued to record it. When it did not disappear and a local origin was discounted, Hewish and Ryle dubbed it LGM-1 (Little Green Men), briefly considering the possibility of it being a signal from a civilisation in deep space - how could such a rhythmic pulsation be from the natural universe?

Bell persevered with her research and eventually the mystery was solved as originating from a previously unknown animal in the celestial zoo, a rapidly spinning neutron star, termed a ''pulsar'', with the announcement made 45 years ago on February 24, 1968.

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Pulsars are small but incredibly dense stars, spinning unbelievably fast, and emit a pulse once each rotation like a lighthouse.

The paper that announced the discovery to the scientific world had five authors, with Hewish's name listed first and Bell's second. This work scored the Nobel prize in physics in 1974, with the award shared by Hewish and Ryle - no mention of Jocelyn Bell. Many in the scientific community saw this as highly controversial, a possible miscarriage of justice, and thought she should have also been a co-recipient.